$32 Million Project: California Opens Largest Public Stem Cell Bank in World

Stem cell storage tanks at new stem cell bank -- Coriell photo

Highlights
300 different stem cell lines
3,000 donors
Coriell, CDI operating, supplying
Stanford, UCLA, UCSF and UCSD involved

Thanks to the taxpayers of California, the Golden State is now home to the largest publicly available stem cell bank in the world.

The state’s $3 billion stem cell agency this morning announced that the bank, located in Marin County north of San Francisco, is open for business.

The project is backed by $32.3 million from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), as the agency is formally known.

In a news release this morning, CIRM said the bank is “offering the first 300 different stem cell lines for researchers interested in gaining a deeper understanding of, and developing treatments for 11 common diseases and disorders.”

The agency said the bank, housed at the Buck Institute in Novato, is collecting samples from as many as 3,000 donors. CIRM said,

“Those samples will then be turned into high quality stem cell lines – known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs – which are available to researchers throughout California and the rest of the world.” 

CIRM Chairman Jonathan Thomas said,

“We believe the bank will be an extraordinarily important resource in helping advance the use of stem cell tools for the study of diseases and finding new ways to treat them.” 

As of this writing, the announcement had received coverage on the San Francisco SFgate Web site and on other sites in the San Francisco Bay Area that are owned a news media chain and another site in Pennsylvania.  The coverage is likely to grow throughout the day, which is important to the agency. It is hard-pressed to generate news coverage for its achievements. 

The bank was funded by awards from California in 2013 and is operated by the non-profit Coriell Institute of Camden, N.J.  Generation of the cells is performed by Cellular Dynamics International, Inc., of Madison, Wisc.

CDI was formed by stem cell pioneer research Jamie Thomson of the University of Wisconsin. It was sold to Fujifilm of Japan earlier this year for $307 million at double its stock price.

Also involved in securing the initial adult cells are researchers at UC San Diego, Stanford, UC San Francisco and UCLA.

Here are links to the press releases at Coriell and CDI. Here is a link to a summary of the CIRM banking initiative and a link to a progress report on the effort. Below is a list of participants and amounts of awards. Click on it to see it in a larger format.

Bluebird and Banking: Media Pluses for California Stem Cell Agency

The California stem cell agency scored a couple of favorable publicity points last week as the result of a successful stock offering by an award recipient and another piece about creation of a stem cell bank in Northern California.

The IPO by bluebird bio (the company's preferred spelling) of Massachusetts was a big winner for the company, raising millions of dollars more than anticipated.

The Boston Globe wrote,

“Shares of the Cambridge life sciences company bluebird bio Inc. soared almost 60 percent on their first day of trading (last) Wednesday, an impressive debut for a business that endured years of stagnation and another encouraging sign for the biotechnology industry.

“The local gene therapy company raised $101 million in an initial public offering priced at $17 per share, higher than the $14 to $16 estimated by investment bankers. Bluebird shares closed at $26.91 per share on Wednesday.”

The stock continues to trade around $25 a share at the time of this writing, which is good news generally for the biotech industry.

The company received a $9.4 million award last fall from the $3 billion stem cell agency. The company has yet to receive any actual cash from the agency as both parties work out final details of an agreement, a spokesman for the agency said last week.

The stem cell agency touted the successful IPO in a blog item by  that said,

“Bluebird Bio, one of the oldest companies in the struggling gene therapy field, is having an outstanding first day in the stock market today, and largely by marrying its gene therapy technology with stem cell science. The company’s financial milestone brings hope and excitement to both fields.”

However, the news stories about the IPO failed to mention the stem cell agency's involvement, which would have been nice for the agency but was to be expected given the way news is covered.

The story about the stem cell bank appeared on Xconomy, an Internet news service dealing with technology. Written by Bernadette Tansey, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, the piece dealt with the both business and science of stem cell banking. She wrote,

“One of the main goals of California’s $3 billion stem cell research agency is to draw companies into the state so they can vie for a share of the funding.

"With a recently funded $32 million initiative, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine(CIRM) has attracted two of the biggest US players in stem cell banking to Novato, CA, to form one of the largest biobanks of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) in the world.”

The stem cell bank effort has become a minor staple in recent news coverage of CIRM, surfacing in a number of articles since the awards were approved. One of the reasons for that is that the project has a relatively straight-forward story line compared to many research efforts and the concept of "banking" is familiar to editors, writers and readers. 

CIRM Takes a Crack at Stem Cell Banking

Stem cell banking is the subject of a day-long CIRM meeting on Wednesday as the stem cell agency wrestles with the costs, distribution and collection of stem cells.

Panels of leading researchers will be taking part in the public session at the Marriot Union Square Hotel in San Francisco. While the workshop will cover a great deal of ground, CIRM singled out one particular area of interest. In a briefing memo, the agency said,

“It would be valuable for the (CIRM) Standards Working Group to give special attention to the segment on privacy, provenance and safety regulation.”